A recent survey found that marriage rates in the United States had dropped precipitously. Only 51% of Americans were married, and marriage rates are dropping similarly in other developed nations. Given how most of the benefits of marriage are conferred by the government, come from being in a happy relationship, or aren’t even real, the government should sanction cohabitations and marriages.

The government has, intentionally or not, created a litany of benefits that only affect the married. Consider gay couples, whose marriages are not recognized by the federal government. They pay on average, an extra $6,000 per year in taxes because they have to file separately. Married couples who file as a married couple qualify for these tax loopholes and save thousands, demonstrating one of the governmental advantages of marriage.

There is also, with some policy makers, an even greater desire to provide more incentives to traditionally married couples. Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell advocated in his Master’s thesis that the government should focus its resources into the family, specifically married couples with kids. This included government policy favoring the married over “co-habitators,” tax policies favoring married couples, advocating of covenant marriages (a type of marriage difficult to enter and near impossible to exit) and other penalties for divorce.

There was also the Healthy Marriages Initiative, passed in 2006, aimed at encouraging and improving marriages. This bill moved $150 million per year to the states to invest in local education on the benefits and workings of marriage, public ads on the benefits of marriage, relationship skills classes to reduce divorce, and a reduction of marriage penalties in aid programs. This shows that government has shown an interest in preserving, promoting, and even subsidizing marriage.

All of this effort to promote marriage, yet is it justifiable? The very fact that the government is trying to subsidize something suggests it is not. Subsidization of goods and services usually only occurs when the government deems that people should be engaging in an activity but aren’t. As the most basic costs of marriage, the paperwork and certificates, are affordable; subsidization isn’t needed to help the poor. So why is the government subsidizing something people don’t want?

There are arguments that marriage contains a litany of health benefits. Some studies have suggested that married people are less likely to have heart attacks, get cancer, require surgery, slip into dementia, and other health benefits. The problem is that it isn’t as simple as that. These are not benefits of the actual act of marriage, but rather of happy cohabitation and socio-economics. The relationship itself is what’s actually important, as the stress of a bad marriage, according to a Feb. 2010 New York Times article, is as damaging to one’s health as smoking. Being married or cohabitating together is just as happy, as long as both relationships are equally healthy.

Furthermore, married people, on average, tend to be wealthier and sometimes healthier than the unmarried. It isn’t that marriage is making people healthier, but that those who are less likely to be unhealthy are also more likely to get married, resulting in a correlation, but not causation. The government benefits of marriage don’t hurt either.

As mentioned, the government throws millions into marriage, from tax breaks to shared health insurance, hospital visitation rights and more. This however doesn’t prove that marriage is a healthy institution, but that the government benefits really can improve people’s lives. If the government gave the same benefits per capita to any other group, from puppeteers to cat lovers, given enough time, these groups would eventually become healthier than the public as a whole.

Yet none of these are actually benefits of marriage itself, but rather byproducts of government benefits. The actual benefits of marriage itself, it would seem, are slight, if any. If all of these incentives and benefits are needed to justify marriage, it begs the question of why bother?

One reason is for the stability of the family. But if that’s the case then these and other policies still don’t make much sense. It was only with the affordable care act that the government improved access to condoms and the pill for the poor and lower middle-class. In fact, up until that law was passed, many insurance companies wouldn’t cover the pill, while it did cover Viagra.

One way to establish stable families is to prevent them from beginning on the wrong foot. Contraceptives, when used properly, allow people to avoid having children until they’re at the right stage in their lives, with a sizable savings and career to allow for time and money necessary to raise children. Yet, these policies are rarely, if ever, advocated to help families; instead it is policies like the healthy marriage initiative which just incentivize marriage and relationships.

There is of course the benefit in keeping both parents together, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they must be married. If two people remained together, while receiving the same benefits as married couples, there would likely be little if any difference, because as shown, few of marriage’s benefits are from the actual institutions. Despite this, most of these policies and initiatives are focused on married couples.

If the government and family activists are truly concerned with the well being of families, they should focus less on the actual institution and more on family planning and keeping people together. Being married is far less valuable than staying together and the benefits conferred through governmental institutions. If anything, they should focus on keeping people together, rather than getting people married and hoping marriage will keep them together, as the 50% divorce rate suggests it won’t.

The big Christmas gift, if disgruntled teens on Twitter are any indication, was the iPad. It’s not just the iPad either, as Amazon has their e-reader, the Amazon Kindle, as their hottest gift of the season. Despite a surge in popularity, I have resisted the allure of the e-reader and tablet computer due to price issues in the usefulness of the tablets and the costs of the e-book market.

To begin, there’s the portability of the tablet, which, unlike the smartphones, are not designed to be portable. It is far too large and heavy to be carried around the way smartphones are, and given their cost and size, the fear of breaking it at a coffee shop, or while walking could be maddening.

Unlike laptops, most tablets lack a keyboard, instead offering a litany of alternatives depending on the model. Most have touch screens which are about as swift as using a self-checkout. Without the straightforward keyboard of a laptop, or the versatility that comes from the compactness of a smart phone, the tablet is left lacking.

Granted there are accessories that fix some of these issues, most notably the attachable keyboards, but that sort of shows the problem. Given how tablets are similar in size to a laptop and the higher end models, the iPad especially, cost the same yet have less computing power, why bother? It would make more sense to buy a low-end laptop, or a netbook, rather than a tablet.

Netbooks are basically mini laptops that only have basic processes like internet and PowerPoint. They are about the same price as a tablet or E-reader, have far more computing power, 1GB memory and 250 GB hard drive, yet have actual keyboards. What’s the point of having a tablet when there are so many superior options?

Unless of course it’s really the e-books purchasers want. The e-book market isn’t the killer app of any of the tablets, except for the Kindle, the product of book seller Amazon.com, but it’s a nascent market. As with any burgeoning market, there are numerous issues that have left me wary of the entire concept.

To begin with, there’s the price difference between e-books and regular books. Consider the prices of a recent popular book, Stephen King’s 11-22-63, which is selling on Amazon in both e-book and hardcover form. The e-book is $14.99, whereas the hardcover is $17.50, a grand savings of $2.51 in exchange for giving up actual ownership of the book.

In exchange for the slightly lower price, the product loses all of the advantage of being an actual physical object. The most basic sacrifice is the durability of having a physical book that can survive a run-in with water, can be written in, used as props and bug killers. Gone too is the textile feel of the paper and page.

More important however, e-books abandon the concept of ownership. It varies by model, but a downloaded book is put into the tablet and e-account so that it can be accessed if anything happens to the tablet. These e-books, however, are subject to company policies regarding downloads.

Consider the iTunes model, which allows songs to be accessed from a total of five different computers before they cannot be accessed unless a computer is de-authorized. This may not seem very consequential, but that’s not the point. The point is, this is not owning a product, it is leasing-plus. The user may have the product, but the company still exerts considerable influence on its use.

Further, it is not even a real product, but rather a digital copy, that cannot be sold or bought or used like their brick and mortar predecessors. By going digital, e-book owners have abandoned the option of reselling their products once finished. Essentially this ensures that only the publishers and main distributors can ever profit off of digital copies; smaller and independent distributors need not apply.

The advent of digital copy may also have a grave impact on the prices of e-books, or any digital product. Again, consider iTunes and how their price system works. Nearly every song is priced the same, from Kelly Clarkson, to The Beatles, to Jesus Jones is $1.29 (as of 12/30/11). There are exceptions, of course, albums have different costs, and there are some less popular songs that are cheaper, but most songs are priced the same.

The reason why everything is priced so similarly is because digital copy removes two crucial forces of retail: rotating product and sales. Barnes and Noble must remove old books to create space for the new. If product isn’t moving it makes more sense to reduce its price, as much as 75%, before returning it to the publisher. The Brick and Mortar model considers profit to be the best, but any revenue is better than no revenue.

For the online store, as long as their computer servers have room to store a digital product, they can. If a product doesn’t sell, merely remove it from the front page, but ensure that it can be found through searching. Imagine e-books, movies, and downloadable TV shows, video games like wiiware, which never decrease in price, regardless of their popularity or age. With unlimited space for unlimited products, there’s less reason to lower prices. If it’s not taking up space, why offer it for less?

Of course there are advantages to the tablets. Being able to reduce thousands of books to a single device will certainly save shelf space, and Stephen King books are easier to carry in digital format. Further, as mentioned, the e-books are cheaper and many books within the public domain are free.

Despite these and other advantages, tablets and e-readers are not for me. A tablet doesn’t offer anything a smartphone, laptop, or netbook can’t. Yet it is harder to use. Even if I wanted an e-book, the digital download market, while useful, has a litany of economic and ownership concerns that leaves me wary.

People love a wedding if the fanfare surrounding the Kardashian wedding, the royal wedding, or the litany of wedding shows is any indication. As pointed out in a recent article by D.A. Wolf, the marriage, the part that extends beyond the ceremony is largely ignored by the media and even those getting married. This is why marriage and weddings should be separated from one another, and the actual planning of the marriage should be de-romanticized, to be planned under a sharp mind, with thoughts towards what justifies ending a marriage.

It seems that weddings and marriage have become synonymous. Mention an engagement, and the conversation shifts to when the big day is, what’s being planned for the ceremony, or how the proposal happened. The conversation rarely, if ever, discusses merging two lives together and establishing the foundation for that life, which will likely include children, perhaps even before the ceremony. Granted, social forays may be partly to blame. It may seem uncouth to pry into something so personal, but these topics must be discussed.

Or worse, one or both members of the couple will discuss their future life, their proposal and their plans through rose colored glasses. Love, soul-mate, destiny, these and other terms are vague, subjective words that obfuscate the gravity of the situation. This is why, when preparing to get married, the future Mr. and Mrs. should do two things, discuss a litany of criteria involving the future without these words, and discuss their divorceable offenses.

The first thing a couple should do is explain to one another why they’re getting married, without using the aforementioned words. This harkens back to an old idiom of writing; it’s better to show than to tell. If a couple cannot find concrete examples of why they love each other, without resorting to the vague words, they don’t understand each other enough to become a single life.

Further, as expectations and finance are top reasons for divorce, describe your fiscal plans. This should involve a complete disclosure of debts, assets, salaries, liens, and other costs. Failure to disclose this information, or reliance on vagaries, “we’ll get by”, “don’t worry, I have a plan” and others serves as a double red flag. It signals a reluctance to reveal yourself to your partner, but also basic or even willful ignorance of the future.

One other idea is for each person to present the other with a list of divorceable offenses. There is the obvious, infidelity, or at least unsanctioned infidelity, spousal abuse, hiding a devastating secret and others. But this is not the point. The point is for each person to verbalize the less obvious justifications for ending a marriage.

There are two reasons for this: the first being insight. Even though marriage is often advertised as the molding of two lives into one, such a fusion is impossible as they cannot share a mind. Without knowing what the other is thinking, they are dependent upon either determining the problem themselves or one day being told. If there are offenses horrendous enough to end a marriage, that aren’t part of the obvious offenses, it behooves both partners to let the other know as soon as possible.

Consider if one member of the couple engaged in the same destructive vice as their partner’s parent. Alcoholism, gambling addiction, drugs. Growing up with this in the household may be terrible enough, but to experience it yet again with their spouse would likely be too much for their marriage to handle. This exercise is merely trying to engage in more communication between the couples, but knowing both what to avoid and how dire it is considered can be invaluable.

There’s a more ulterior motive for vocalizing divorceable offenses however: secret feelings. Hiding aspects of our personality is common during the courtship process. But at some point, both have to show their hands, and it’s better to do so when they can afford to leave the table.

Consider if one member of the couple wrote that they would consider getting fat a divorceable offense. Perhaps to some having children warrants a divorce, or not having children, not having a boy, failing to meet standards of living established by only one member of the couple. It is quite possible that one person will have an expectation of the marriage that is so outrageous or unrealistic, or just horrifying that it would be grounds for ending the engagement.

Everyone has expectations about their spouse, some realistic, some not realistic. But isn’t it better to discover these expectations, both to determine if they are worth perusing and as a window into the other’s mind? Discovering that a partner is shallow enough to divorce over physical appearance might be a large enough red flag to justify backing out of the marriage. Better to leave in the beginning, rather than be left eight years into the marriages when she decides her husband has become too fat.

These ideas certainly will not save a marriage. Forging a new life is a complicated process with thousands of variables that can never be accounted for. Still, focusing on the grittier side of marriage, the expectations, the finances, and the painful, personal stuff that usually goes unsaid will go a long way towards creating a more stable union. This is best accomplished by eschewing frilly language and clearly communicating expectations, plans for the future, and skeletons from the past.

When It’s Too Involved

There is a general agreement that the government should be able to enter the family unit in order to protect children, but under what conditions? Child abuse and neglect are the obvious intervention worthy offenses, but foster care has recently removed a child due to weight issues. While the government’s intentions may have been noble, this opens a can of worms regarding fat prejudice, government authority, and classification of offenses.

Government workers were first alerted to the child’s condition after he was brought in for sleep apnea, a condition commonly associated with obesity. After working with the mother for 20 months and not seeing any improvements in his weight, the government took the boy into foster care. They argued that the mother’s inability to reduce her son’s weight was dangerously negligent due to the increased risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.

This reasoning is troubling as fat does not cause these problems, but rather is a symptom of the true cause. Diabetes has numerous causes, but the type they’re likely worried about, type II, is caused by high blood sugar over a prolonged period. The causes of high blood pressure meanwhile are not exactly known, but range from lack of exercise, consumption of too much salt and alcohol, or stress.

If the government is trying to prevent diabetes and high blood pressure, are they going to remove children from families that engage in the other causes of these diseases? What of families where a teenager smokes? Smoking also contributes to high blood pressure, and while children and teens certainly shouldn’t be smoking, is this an offense so abhorrent that it warrants government action?

Further, this is targeting the overweight. As mentioned, the link between these diseases isn’t so much causal as correlative, yet the government removed the child because his weight failed to decline. This is a prejudicial assumption that the overweight are automatically unhealthy or are at risk for becoming unhealthy.

Consider that, according to the office of minority health, a division of the department of health and human services, African Americans are twice as likely to develop diabetes compared to whites. Should the government start taking African American or poor children because of the risk of health problems? Of course not.

That was an outrageous example, of course, as aside from genetic predispositions, there is not any causal correlation between race and diabetes. That was the point, however, that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Simply being fat doesn’t cause these illnesses; they are caused by a person’s lifestyle.

Despite this, it seems highly unlikely that government agencies are investigating thin children to test their blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and risk for diabetes. Some thin children may have worse blood pressure and cholesterol rates than the overweight kids, but no one would know because fat is associated with unhealthy. If the government does choose which kids to investigate based upon weight, rather than lifestyle, they’re engaging in fat prejudice.

In fairness, this line of logic seems sound at first. Overweight children, unless they have health issues causing their weight gain, such as hormone imbalances, are fat because they eat poorly and don’t exercise. As the logic goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, except sometimes there isn’t fire, just the potential for fire.

These distinctions are good to discuss, because as Dr. Naim Alkhouri of the Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital explains, the guidelines for intervention are murky. If the government isn’t sure what the guidelines are for removing children based upon weight issues, what hope do the parents have of knowing? Granted, in this case the government worked with the mother for 20 months, so it wasn’t an abrupt intervention, but if the interventions become more common, guidelines must be established.

Which leads to another question, should the government even be involved in this? The Ohio Child and Family Services website defines issues warranting an investigation as abuse, neglect or dependency. While vague, these terms likely evoke thoughts of child beaters, rapists, children addicted to crack, or other horrid examples.

When considering reasons for removing children from parents, these examples are probably the most common. This is because the removal of a child is supposed to be a worst case scenario, with a clear and present danger. There was not a sense of danger with the boy in question, as he did not have any present health issues worse than his sleep apnea, just the potential for health issues. The slippery slope argument is a specious one, but taking children from their families over potential danger is a dangerous precedent to establish.

Furthermore, removing children may not improve matters. This isn’t the same as removing a child from a family with abusive or dangerously neglectful parents; the problem, poor diet and exercise, is everywhere. In fact, the boy’s foster mother has reported having problems keeping up with his health and exercise appointments, suggesting removal wasn’t a panacea. Even if improvements are made, what happens when the child is returned home and the conditions haven’t changed? He’ll likely gain the weight back.

No one is denying the importance of keeping children healthy and fighting childhood obesity, but there is a limit to these measures. The removal of children from their families, simply because of their potential to develop serious diseases is a dangerous development. It creates precedent for removal based on conditions many wouldn’t consider justified, is prejudiced against the overweight and may not work.

A minor controversy ignited when President Obama nominated Regina Benjamin, who is slightly overweight, for Surgeon General back in 2009. This controversy illustrates a cardinal idea for healthcare reform, putting aside the politics of fat. Obesity costs the healthcare industry billions each year, but prejudice towards the overweight, and ignoring the dangers of being underweight compounds the damage.

The healthcare bill will likely fail to penalize those that engage in risky or unhealthy behavior, in contrast to many insurance programs. Most health insurance companies charge those seen as high risk factors with higher premiums. Smokers and the overweight take the brunt of this policy, which makes sense, to a point.

Being overweight can lead to a litany of problems, from diabetes, to heart disease, and countless pains of the body. These ailments would lead to higher healthcare costs and should thus be compensated through higher premiums. This is not a foolproof concept, however, and needs to be reformed.

To begin with, while the overweight pay more in premiums, not all health problems are caused by weight. For issues such as disease, accidents, and other ailments not related to being overweight, compensation needs to be provided. If being overweight isn’t the reason for a claim, why pay extra?

Deductibles for claims not related to being overweight should be significantly reduced in order to compensate. Regulations will be needed; otherwise the compensation could be rejected for reasons as absurd as “the car wouldn’t have hit her if she was thinner.” Such arguments sadly do occur, but are unique to the government and big business.

The concept of what constitutes a healthy weight needs to be reevaluated, as well. A study by the CDC suggests that being slightly overweight will reduce the risk of death, as opposed to being obese or underweight. That is why the criteria for judging optimal weight should be based on health, not societal norms.

Despite the underweight having a higher risk of death than those slightly overweight or normal weights, they do not pay a higher premium. Societal prejudice towards the overweight is a likely cause, as well as a disposition to think of thinner as healthier. This is not always the case, as lack of body fat can reduce resilience to diseases. The insured who severely deviate from their healthiest bodyweight should be penalized with higher premiums, the over and underweight.

Two 2003 journals from Obesity research suggest that doctors are prejudiced towards overweight patients, blaming their weight for any ailment. This prejudice adds to healthcare costs for two reasons. The first reason is because those who are overweight often postpone regular checkups because of poor treatment by doctors. This causes preventable diseases to fester and worsen.

The second reason is misdiagnosis. Skin rashes, car accident induced leg pain, and other problems are often blamed on a person’s weight. Such perfunctory analysis means the real source of a patient’s illness might not be diagnosed until much later. By then, her condition may have deteriorated, because of societal prejudice.

All pronouns that have been used so far have been she, this is not an accident. A report for the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity shows that the aforementioned prejudices are more pronounced for women. Whereas a man won’t see a decline in the quality of treatment until he’s at least 65 pounds overweight, for a woman it’s only 13 pounds. Even accounting for gender related body differences; this is still a large gap.

The politics of fat have been sapping healthcare funds for too long now. Reforms need to be made to adequately address costs from being overweight, but also underweight. The concept of healthy weight should be based on how it impacts the body, not a knee-jerk belief that being a little overweight is automatically bad.  If prejudices towards the overweight continue, it’ll continue to drive up healthcare costs, and that means higher costs for everyone.